Report from Baghdad: 4 Scholars Reveal What They Found During a Visit in June

by Keith Watenpaugh, Edouard Méténier, Jens Hanssen, Hala Fattah

Following are excerpts from a report filed on July 15, 2003 by four scholars who visited Baghdad in June to survey the state of the city's cultural institutions. The report--Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-War Baghdad-- can be read in its entirety on H-Net.

Located at the northern end of Baghdad’s historic core between the Tigris and the old Ministry of Defence complex, Bayt al-Hikma has taken its name from a translation/research institute founded by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun in 832 CE that was famous for its translations of Greek philosophical texts into Arabic. The modern Bayt al-Hikma was established in 1995 by the Presidential Office itself. As originally conceived, this Bayt al-Hikma functioned as a research center, with lecture facilities, publications, a library and museum. The faculty associates of Bayt al-Hikma were drawn from the various universities in Baghdad and divided according to discipline. Junior researchers received stipends and office space at the institute. It produced several journals, including a monthly general interest cultural magazine, the Majallat al-Hikma as well as useful editions/translations of sources and documents in foreign languages.

Before the fall of the regime, the Bayt al-Hikma acquired the reputation of being intimately tied to the elite inner-circles of power. Doctoral dissertations and other scholarly work attributed to members of Saddam Hussein’s family were ghost-written by faculty affiliates. More generally, the Bayt al-Hikma served as a center for the production of regime-sanctioned knowledge and political orthodoxy. It was surprising then that of all the institutions in Baghdad, it has been among the first to receive money for redevelopment from the CPA. The staff have begun repairing and repainting one wing of the complex with a $17,000 grant from Ambassador Cordone’s predecessor, the American diplomat John Limbert. New computers were in evidence as were chairs and tables. When asked about why his office had moved quickly on behalf of Bayt al-Hikma, Cordone, replied that it had been “cleansed” of high-ranking Baathists, estimating that 75 people had been removed. He also noted that a new international board of trustees for the institute was being formed to oversee its redevelopment. Despite Cordone’s support, the future of Bayt al-Hikma is problematic: Erdmann anticipates that for ideological reasons it may be allowed to “wither away.”

We asked the chair of the history program of Bayt al-Hikma, the Medievalist Dr. Abdul-Jaffar al-Naji about the connections with the ancien régime. He admitted that these were complex and shaped by the repressive nature of the Baathists. However, in an interesting turn, he used words like “re-establish” and “re-institute” to describe the ongoing work of the institution. These were not references to the pre-war efforts of Bayt al-Hikma, but rather to the original 9th Century version thereof. This style of conscious anachronism was a central practice of Baathist nationalist historicist thought and it is significant that this institution has fallen back into that pattern. Consistent with its “forerunner,” the center was refocusing efforts on translation, organizing a conference of Orientalists in November on the civilization of Wadi al-Rafidain (Mesopotamia) and publishing a multi-volume work on the history of Ashurnasirpal’s Babylon. Again, this focus on the pre-Islamic “Arab” past of Mesopotamia – the “restoration” of Babylon being the most prominent example of the phenomenon – was a key element of the nationalist metanarratives employed by the regime and invented and defended by faculty from the Bayt al-Hikma. During our two visits, we noted a cautiousness, defensiveness and lack of openness on the part of most of the faculty at Bayt al-Hikma.

The building that once housed the National Library
and Archives is located on Rashid Street
opposite the Mandate-era buildings of the old
Ministry of Defence. The modern three-storied
structure has four wings built around a central
courtyard. It included library stacks, reading
rooms, microform reading equipment, bindery,
photocopying offices, laser printers and photography
labs. For a précis on its holdings see the
previous report of group member Edouard Méténier
at the MELCOM website. We met twice
with library staff, including the current director,
Mr. Kamil Jawad Ashur. On the second occasion, we made a complete visual survey of the
building’s interior itself. We should note that the
“Hawza” has added their own guards, complete
with a semblance of a uniform of black shirts,
slacks and beards, to the library – perhaps not
trusting the library staff to adequately care for
what is left, or to monitor events at the library
and their interests therein.

According to library employees and representatives
of the “Hawza,” the library fell victim to two
separate arson attacks. During the first attack,
while the Americans were at the gates of Baghdad,
looters took most of the high-ticket items
like photocopiers, computers, scanners and office
equipment. A small fire broke-out in the building
at that time, perhaps to cover the tracks of the
looters. In a point that is still unclear, Ashur
noted that employees moved books from the offlimits
collection – perhaps both rare and politically
sensitive books –to what he termed a “secret
safe location” before the hostilities. He refused
to disclose the location to us; noting, quite
rightly that it would then “no longer be a secret.”
When asked if the CPA knew of the location of
this cache of books, he assured us they did. In
our conversation with Ashur, he estimated that
50% of the library’s collection burned. Later
discoveries cast doubt on the amount destroyed,
and actual numbers may be an order of magnitude
less than estimated. He was unwilling to
share with us how he reached this figure and
there are no records whatsoever of what is stored
in various remote locations.

Ashur confirmed that among the items packed
and stored before the war were newspapers, periodicals
and Ottoman archival materials including
tapu (cadastral) registers, sijils (court proceedings)
and firmans (imperial decrees.) He
thinks that around 350 tapu documents and no
more than one half of the 1500 sijil records remain.
He also confirmed that over the last five
or six years the central authorities moved the
entire Ottoman collection of Mosul and about
half of the Ottoman collection of Basra to Baghdad.
The complete lack of precision and the fact
that stories often shifted and amounts of books
and other materials ranged so widely from day to
day, led us again to doubt the overall veracity of
the employees’ accounts of what occurred and
moreover their competence as library administrators.

Nothing prepared us for the sheer horror of the interior of the library. All
that remains in the main wing are piles of ash that had been books. The heat
in the entry hall of the library had been so intense that it had begun to melt
the ceramic floor tiles. Much of the structure had lost integrity from the heat
and the cement walls crumbled at the touch. Those areas not directly burned,
perhaps half the building, are covered in an oily soot which has provided a
useful medium for graffiti. Scattered throughout the library is the phrase “Death
to Saddam the Apostate” and signed by the “Hawza,” suggesting that they saw
their intervention on behalf of the library as a combination of civic duty,
religious activism and a blow against the memory of the regime. Iraqi engineers
and representatives from Cordone’s office inspected the building and pronounced
it unusable. The ambassador informed us that he hopes to be able to use the
officers’ club building at al-Balat al-Malki as a temporary storage location
while a new structure is built. Plans for this move are tentative. There are
no immediate plans to rebuild the library, and the future employment status
of the library employees is unclear.